From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural

by Lynn Schofield Clark

Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer , and the Left Behind series are but the latest manifestations of American teenagers' longstanding fascination with the supernatural and the paranormal. In this groundbreaking book, Lynn Schofield Clark explores the implications of this fascination for
contemporary religious and spiritual practices. Relying on stories gleaned from more than 250 in-depth interviews with teens and their families, Clark seeks to discover what today's teens really believe and why. She finds that as adherence to formal religious bodies declines, interest in alternative
spiritualities as well as belief in "superstition" grow accordingly. Ironically, she argues, fundamentalist Christian alarmism about the forces of evil has also fed belief in a wider array of supernatural entities.

Resisting the claim that the media "brainwash" teens, Clark argues that today's popular stories of demons, hell, and the afterlife actually have their roots in the U.S.'s religious heritage. She considers why some young people are nervous about supernatural stories in the media, while others
comfortably and often unselfconsciously blur the boundaries between those stories of the realm beyond that belong to traditional religion and those offered by the entertainment media. At a time of increased religious pluralism and declining participation in formal religious institutions, Clark says,
we must completely reexamine what young people mean--and what they may believe--when they identify themselves as "spiritual" or "religious."

Offering provocative insights into how the entertainment media shape contemporary religious ideas and practices, From Angels to Aliens paints a surprising--and perhaps alarming--portrait of the spiritual state of America's youth.

Genres: Nonfiction

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Lynn Schofield Clark is Professor and Chair of the Department of Media, Film and Journalism Studies and Director of the Estlow International Center for Journalism and New Media at the University of Denver. An ethnographer who has studied and worked with diverse U.S. families and young people for more than 15 years, Clark is interested in how the everyday uses of digital, mobile and social media shape peoples’ identities and aspirations, particularly in the context of widening income inequality in the United States. She teaches courses in journalism, media and intersectionalities, and media studies. Clark is also a member of the Research Team YELL (Youth Engaged in Leadership & Learning), which is part of the University of Denver’s Bridge Project under the University’s Graduate School of Social Work.

Clark is coauthor of Young People and the Future of News: Social Media and the Rise of Connective Journalism, published by Cambridge University Press in 2017 with Associate Professor Regina Marchi of Rutgers University. The book traces the practices that are evolving as young people come to see news increasingly as something shared via social networks and social media rather than produced and circulated solely by professional news organizations. It’s been described as “original,” “insightful,” and, by National Public Radio’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro, as “a cautionary tale” for journalists and journalism.

Clark’s book The Parent App: Understanding Families in a Digital Age (Oxford University Press, 2012), was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice, and a nice summary of the book can be found in the University of Denver’s magazine. Clark’s first book, From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural (Oxford University Press, 2003/2005) explored how young people from varied (and no) religious backgrounds interpreted popular culture’s stories of the supernatural in relation to religious and spiritual understandings. It received the National Communication Association’s Best Scholarly Book Award from the Ethnography Division. She is also co-author of Media, Home, and Family (Routledge, 2004), which explored how families establish media policies and how those policies relate to family identity-construction practices. She is editor of Religion, Media, and the Marketplace ( Rutgers , 2007), and co-editor of Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media (Columbia University Press, 2002), and a co-editor (with Erika Polson and Radhika Gajjala) of a volume on media and class. Her work is also published in the Journal of Communication, the International Journal of Communication, Journalism, Communication Theory, Critical Studies in Media Communication, New Media & Society, Feminist Media Studies, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and in several other journals and edited volumes.

Clark’s research has been cited in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, Boston Globe, Hollywood Reporter, the Independent (U.K.), and in other publications; featured on CNN, NPR, BBC-Radio, and PBS; and has been presented before audiences at Harvard, Oxford, University of Copenhagen, Haifa University, RMIT (Australia), the University of North Carolina, Indiana University, the American Academy of Religion, the International Communication Association, the American Anthropological Association, the Association of Education for Journalism and Mass Communication, and in numerous other national and international venues.

She is Vice President/President Elect of the international Association of Internet Researchers and a past President of the International Society for the study of Media, Religion, and Culture. She was a Visiting Professor at the University of Copenhagen in 2009 and in 2014, Visiting Fellow at the Digital Ethnography Research Center at RMIT (Melbourne, Australia) in 2014, a 1997-98 Louisville Institute Dissertation Fellow and a 1998 nominee to the Harvard Society of Fellows. She serves on the editorial board

Reviews

[Ryan Denson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Clark's study takes up the topic of the influence of modern entertainment's depictions of the supernatural on teenagers. It is a fascinating topic that proves to be an entertaining read. However, Clark's methodology and presentation are dubious at best. She does not claim to attempt broad generalizations about modern teenagers, but the small sample size (100 interviewees) does not seem to be able to elicit any tangible findings. Furthermore, Clark devises five categories for teenagers, which are so fluid, aside from the ones she defines as "traditionalists," that there is not much utility in them. These categories, along with much of Clark's analysis, also show the clear influence of her own personal biases on this project. Although she ultimately concludes class is not the dominant factor in teenagers' attitudes toward the supernatural, much of the book is preoccupied with a Marxist framework. The closing sections, however, do offer some good analysis on the role of individualism in modern beliefs.

Clark chooses to foreground a handful of her interviews, making them the focus of the analysis. I suspect this was primarily an effort to affirm her categorizations. A more interesting, and perhaps more fruitful, structure would have been to focus on the entertainment media's recent portrayals of the supernatural. Her analysis of the themes and relevance of Buffy to modern teen culture was quite insightful and more pertinent to the subject than the thoughts of only a few individuals. The trend towards the supernatural is even more apparent in the media since this book was published. The popularity of Twilight, Supernatural, Grimm, Lucifer, American Horror Story, Constantine, and others have manifestly illustrated this trend. A focus on the entertainment media itself and the themes in recent depictions would be a useful endeavor for an updated version of this study.

Despite these problems, I believe there is some accuracy in the central idea of this work: that more people (mostly millienials) are interested in the supernatural and different belief traditions. This is shown by the rise of neopagan groups, which Sarah Johnston's article "Whose Gods are These? A Classicist Looks at Neopaganism"(https://www.academia.edu/3667375/Whos...) briefly examines. Clark's assessment of the increasing natural individuality and declining adherence to traditional belief systems and instituions does much to explain this trend. The proliferation of the internet has also helped to spread these ideas, which previously could only be found in some esoteric bookshops, to a wider audience. These studies do much to highlight the lived experience of modern individuals.

[Sarah Maddaford · Rating 3 out of 5]

While the book is written on a very interesting topic, the format does detract a bit from the subject. The author repeated some of her own sentences and her chapters, especially the ones without primary source data, are a bit long. Her conclusions are fairly intriguing: teens do not connect religion and the supernatural even though their interest in the latter can be dependent on the former. I picked up this book expecting a fairly easy read detailing members of my generation and our fascination with the supernatural. It was a very dense read, but it was interesting enough to finish.

[Steve Wiggins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good overview of how the supernatural gets pulled into a media-fueled mix in the minds of teens. A very informative ethnography. See more at: Sects and Violence in the Ancient World.

[Cassie Walrath · Rating 1 out of 5]

Informative but very dry. Hard to get through and at some points I felt as if I was reading a TV Guide or a television script when television shows were discussed.